Emily: Looking Forward to That Horses Story, Keith. I Am Emily Reppert

Keith: What is up, everyone? I am in Wyoming to learn more about wild horses. That is coming up. Channel One News starts right now.

Emily: Looking forward to that horses story, Keith. I am Emily Reppert.

And first up today, emergency crews are still looking for more than a dozen people missing since Tuesday's deadly mudslides in California.

Search teams in Southern California are working to reach areas buried in mud and debris. On Tuesday torrential rains overwhelmed the town of Montecito and surrounding coastal communities, causing mud, boulders and debris to flow down hills with no plants or trees to slow it after they were wiped out by last month's massive wildfires.

Sheriff Bill Brown: It looked like a World War I battlefield. It was literally a carpet of mud and debris everywhere.

Emily: Helicopters rescued dozens of stranded people. Crews on the ground also searched for victims. In Burbank a massive mudslide ruined vehicles and damaged homes.

Heidi Donato: There was cars washing down, power lines washing down, huge boulders coming down, huge trees coming down.

Emily: At least 15 people have been killed, and the destruction could take months to clean up.

Next up, hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children have caught a break.A judge ruled they can't be forced to leave the country — for now — and that they are still protected under the DACA program started by President Obama.

A federal judge has temporarily stopped President Trump's decision to end the DACA program, which protects an estimated 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.The judge ruled DACA recipients should not be deported until legal challenges have made their way through the courts.

The ruling comes a day after the president said the issue needed to be handled by Congress but that he would only support a DACA plan that included $18 billion to begin building a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. DACA had been scheduled to expire on March 5.

You know the saying, “You can't tame a wild horse”? Well, that might not be the case for long for the tens of thousands that roam free out West.Keith Kocinski shows us how an exploding horse population is causing big problems.

Keith: It is a symbol of the great American West: horses running free across the open range.

What do horses mean to you?

Emma: They're, like, an escape for me to get away from my problems and all my responsibilities. And, like, they are my best friends.

Tate Johnson: They are tough, really tough. And they're pretty photogenic; they’re — I mean, honestly, they're pretty amazing.

Keith: They are beautiful to see, but for many who rely on the land, these horses are tough to keep in check.

Tate: It's becoming an issue that you hear about all the time because it's causing serious problems.

Keith: Tate Johnson's family runs a cattle ranch on nearly 10,000 acres in Rush Valley, Utah.

Tate: It was settled in 1856 by Lucas Johnson.

Keith: That is Tate’s ancestor. His family has been here for generations. He says, in the past, wild horses damaged their land and ate their cattle's food supply.

How do wild horses impact your family’s business?

Tate: Well, the wild horses aren't necessarily the problem; it's the numbers. When the wild horses aren't kept at manageable levels, they kind of destroy the resources and the grazing that we work hard to upkeep and depend on.

Keith: And their population is growing by about 20 percent a year. It is a problem so bigthe federal government has already spent millions working to get them under control.

The Bureau of Land Management gathers horses and brings them here to holding facilities, where they are later put up for adoption.

For decades the BLMhasrounded up excess horses and placed them in private ranches and feedlots, but the increasing cost of care is making it difficult to take in more horses. And the population on the range is growing too fast.

Lisa Reid: In the last 10 years, we've gone from 30,000 to over 70,000.

Keith: Because they are growing so fast, there is a push to allow some to be killed to protect the land and to keep the wild horses from starving to death.

Mark Wintch: What do you do with your cats and dogs when there’s too many in the city? Do you just let them run rampant and scatter throughout the city?

Keith: The option to euthanize horses to reduce numbers was included in President Trump's proposed budget for 2018,which also called for a $10-million funding cut to the Wild Horse and Burro program.But there has been a lot of pushback, so what happens next to the horses is still being debated.

And some say the horses are being singled out. Across 10 states 26.9 million acres of public land is set aside for wild horses.Meanwhile, there is 155 million acres for livestock, like cattle.

Simone Netherlands: Absolutely not an overpopulation problem with wild horses. What we have is a discrimination problem. They are under attack by our own government.

Keith: Wild horse advocates want time to try other methods to control the population. Jim Schnepel volunteers with the BLM to administer PZP, making the horses unable to reproduce. It costs less than $30 per horse and can last for up to a year.

Jim Schnepel: We have good access. The herd is pretty easy to get to. There are many other herds that are more difficult to get to. With that said, there are many volunteers who would be willing to go out and dart these horses.

Keith: Tim Wakefield is part of Wyoming's Bureau of Land Management's Wild Horse and Burro program. He says it is pretty much impossible to keep the horses from reproducing, and so far, most solutions like PZP haven't been totally effective.

What is the long-term solution, then?

Tim Wakefield: You know, it's hard to say. There isn’t — I don't know that there's a good solution. People love the wild horses, but when there’s that many horses on the range, the overpopulation could damage the range.

Tate: The numbers are so large that it’s gonna take something big to get control of it.

Keith: Lawmakers and experts are still working on figuring out a long-term solution, but there is no doubt wild horses will roam the range and remain a symbol of the freedom of the American West.

Keith Kocinski, Channel One News.

Emily: Thanks, Keith.

Now, the decision on funding for the horses and how to control their population is expected to be decided as Congress finalizes this year's budget later this month.

And to learn more about animals under threat, head to ChannelOne com.

All right, when we get back, buckle up for one of the coolest car shows in the country.

Emily: Now it is time to get your geek on at the biggest tech party of the year. The Consumer Electronics Show began this week in Las Vegas, and it is where all the latest tech and gadgets make their debut to the world. And this year, there are some pretty cool new rides.

The cars of the future will do more than drive you around. They will entertain you while they do the driving.

Nissan is working on what it calls brain-to-vehicle technology, which reads your brainwaves to help control the car.

Intel showed off the Volocopter. It is designed to be an air taxi,autonomously flying you around a city from Point A to Point B.

Florian Reuter: The great potential lies in using this on-demand, summoned by an app — just like an Uber today — shared service that we offer.

Emily: Wow, love that car with the screen. I would totally binge.

Now you just heard today's Word in the News: autonomous, which means independent, not controlled by something outside.

And in this case, we are talking about vehicles that don't need humans to control them. Tom Hanson has got more on challenges those kinds of cars are facing.

Tom: Oh yes, Emily. One of the major obstacles for self-driving technology right now: bad weather conditions on the road. But students at Michigan State University are working to solve that problem. Check it out.

Daniel Kent: What you're seeing here is a live feed of the lidar sensors.

Tom: According to Daniel Kent, a graduate student at Michigan State University, this is the future.

Kent: The colored output is from the two up top; the white dots are the ones lower on the vehicle.

Tom: A car that can communicate with other vehicles and the environment and make real-time decisions based on that data. Engineers like Kent are working to make self-driving cars not only a reality but the main mode of transportation.

John Verboncoeur: People who can't drive now — whether because of disabilities, because of age, because of declining vision, those sorts of things — they won't have to rely on someone else to take them around. They'll have a vehicle that could do that.

Tom: John Verboncoeur is the associate dean for research at MSU. He says through the use of sensors, cameras and mapping, researchers collect data, test it and work to make it easier for cars like this one to see during ice or snow, while going 70 miles an hour.

Verboncoeur: There are big piles of leaves, and those leaves can accumulate in the street, and those leaves can obscure lane markings. So we have many detailed mapping software and databases that tell you where the roadway should be.

Tom: Verboncoeur says that mapping software includes car sensors and a way for cars to talk to other cars.

Verboncoeur: The cars that come after them could also understand that there's ice coming up, and so they could say, “Okay, for this stretch of road where there's known to be ice, we need to allow for additional stopping distance."

Tom: Tom Hanson, Channel One News.

Emily: Cool stuff, Tom.

All right, guys, it is time for us to zoom on out of here. Have a great day. We will see you right back here tomorrow.

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